A Thruppny Bit

I remember clearly the very day my pocket money became worthless. I was seven, maybe eight when it happened. Every Sunday my dad would give me a thruppny-bit. Thruppence was a pittance for pocket money by any standards but, hey, we were poor. I loved it when I got the one that had the portcullis on it, not the one with the weed.

Every Monday on my way to school I had a choice to make. Take the shortcut or go the long way around and stop in at the grocer to buy a bag of mixed pear drops. It wasn’t a hard choice when you had a thruppny-bit in your pocket. Those sweets were pure magic. Sugar-coated, fruity, and everything. And buying a bag of them was the best way anyone could ever spend their pocket money. Thruppence would get me about a dozen. The grocer would scoop them up out of the towering glass jar which must have had about a million in, even the sound of the hard sweets being scooped up was thrilling, and then he’d pour them carefully out of the metal scoop straight into a crisp, white paper bag, and he’d do a little flick-and-twist of the bag to close it at the corners. For this poor boy, being handed a dozen mixed pear drops in a white paper bag closed with curly ears was wealth beyond measure.

No wealth for me on that fateful day, though. The grocer clicked my thruppny-bit down on the countertop with great force and said, “Sorry, son, but I need a shilling …er, I mean a 5p coin.” A shilling! That was four thruppny-bits! Four! I didn’t understand. I’m not very bright at the best of times and I hadn’t been paying much attention to the looming national decimalisation date. Nor had my dad, it seems, for he had blithely given me my pocket money in a currency that was no longer legal tender.

I left the grocer’s shop bitter and dejected. I remember kicking loose stones on the pavement in utter frustration. To cheer myself up, I thought I’d catch the number 7 bus to school. It stopped. I boarded. The doors closed behind me. The doors opened again. I got off. I stood there at the bus stop outside the grocer’s and stared in disbelief at the portcullis in my hand. The treachery! Why wasn’t my money working? It’s my pocket money!

I still had a mile to walk to school and I now did not have my usual stash of mixed pear drops to sustain and hearten me on the mile walk. Now, my world wasn’t mine anymore, and my pocket money wasn’t money in my pocket anymore. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was to be completely broke. This was a really, really bad day.

And yet, sixty-odd years later, that small twelve-sided brass coin with the portcullis on it is still my favourite coin, and pear drops in a white paper packet with twisty ears are still my favourite sweets.